Taft, Ann Patchett

Charles Alston, Family No. 1

(May 27, 2007) Taft was OK – readable, sweet-natured, and with something about it that I’ve liked in all the Patchett books I’ve read, but it’s not a book I could rave about. It was like Magician’s Assistant and Patron Saint of Liars in that way: I liked them enough to finish them, but I didn’t read them avidly nor lament their ending.

This one is about a black man (and told from his point of view) whose jazz-joint life in Memphis is turned completely upside down by two white teenagers from hick-town Tennessee. The notion that such characters would get thrown together and behave in this way is, in itself, a kind of unbelievable premise, and I’m also never convinced that Patchett is presenting me with the consciousness of either a man or a black person. Though, how would I know, lol? Still, there’s a lot that’s familiarly white middle-class about the way the narrator and other characters think and speak.

But everyone’s quite likable, no one’s a strange drifter, and there’s a charm in Patchett’s attention to domestic details that I find engaging in this and all these books. It’s about the only thing that Bel Canto has in common with these other books – except that, in Bel Canto, it is a hundred times more successful: it is totally enthralling for its own sake, not to mention pivotal to the action and characterization. (I’m thinking of the Vice-President’s concern for everyone’s comfort, the terrorists learning to garden, the conceiving of how 120 people would live together in one room for four months.) On top of this, Bel Canto has a riveting premise and characters that are various and unforgettable. Bel Canto is light years ahead of the other three in terms of creating an imaginative reality that is convincing and spellbinding. It’s as though it was written by a completely different writer than the author of The Magician’s Assistant, The Patron Saint of Liars and Taft.